Giving the feds the right to sue is meaningless. DOJ is already busy with more important work so staff and money will not be allocated to robocalls. Maybe 5 callers will get hit, the DOJ will issue 1,000 press releases crowing about the success of the law, 10,000 web sites will write an article and the calls will continue..

If the victim- the person called- had the tight to make a civil claim for $10,000 the "advertise on TV' lawyers would have a field day with automatically generated demands for Visa account records to identify the callers (and if Visa doesn't "Know its customer" they get added to the case) and about half the the calls would vanish.

But giving DOJ the right to sue? Just PR. Put it in your calendar for 12/19/2022 with the question "did it work" and see for yourself.

They may be ferociously smart but even the best college kids are still kids. They screw up; they cheat; they panic; they go down the wrong path and are too afraid to turn around.

College, thank God, isn't an infantry platoon on a cold, windswept hill in a country you've never heard of; its an lovely, expensive, sandbox where the puppies go to frisk and play and learn. One mistake when you're 19 doesn't get you a grave in Arlington, it gets you a sleepless night and a visit with the dean. You get spanked... then you go home for Christmas and get on with life.

As a former miscreant all I can say is, "Thank you administrators." A nice story about applied common sense.

Let me see, a U.S. based advocacy group files a lawsuit in U.S. Courts which claims children were injured near a mine in Zaire owned by European companies. Why not sue in Europe- or even Zaire?

Well, for starters, if you file a frivolous suit in Europe you have to pay the other side's legal bills. In the U.S. there is no such rule and thus no penalty for filing frivolous suits. Anybody here want to make a $100 bet on the outcome of the suit on, let's say, January 1, 2024? Or you could just go back and look at any of the 2016-17 Slashdot "X has just filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against Y company which doesn't do business here" and see where they went.

Now let's be frank; this is a press release with a legal filing attached and is designed to gin-up articles like this. This may sound like a bit of harmless fun but it is not.

First, real litigants here in the U.S. can't get their cases heard because filings like these use legal maneuvers to get put at the "must be heard today" docket. Basically out federal courts are being choked with crap- and the judges allow it to happen because, frankly, talking about mines in Zaire is much more fun that talking about FOIA requests the government is ignoring or cases of product liability happening right next door. All of the phoney "we don't have enough Judges" stuff would be ended if the Judges would spend one weekend reading the recent filings and toss them- with costs- on the following Monday. The breathless "A suit has been filed..." article would be followed the next day with a "The Judge has thrown out the suit" article- and the pplaintiff would be faced with some serious bills and, worse, laughter

Second, in addition to the real costs of Judicial crowding out, we get the mindshare problem. In the press business there is something called "a story hook", which means "We really want to write another story on (fill in the far left or far right blank) and this lawsuit gives us the excuse to write one- or half-a-dozen- stories on our favorite pet, ideological hobby horse. So the Nazi press was filled with stories about fat Jewish business men defiling innocent Christian shop girls, the Soviet press was filled with the latest revelations in the trials of British spys and the U.S. got thousands of articles about the child stuck in a well- at least American bloviating has a human interest angle and always includes the innocent child in danger trope... because the average person cares about lost animals and children, and let me tell you, that's not all half bad.

But Slashdot is not supposed to be about lost children in the well. It should be a bit more serious than that and I'm both saddened and annoyed when the lead article is another "baby in the well" story. For the fun of it go back to Slashdot 12/17/2017, look at the articles and ask, "How much of this mattered and why was it here". And the answer will be...

Maybe it is time to retire the term "AI" or at least pair it with a twin "ASS" for artificial stupidity. Mechanical inference is not intelligence. AI is salesman-speak for "My machine is somehow smart"

Public-key/private-key encryption systems are based on factoring primes and the premise is no one can identify all the primes in a truly huge list of whole numbers starting at zero.

So now that we know what Google can do in corporate spare time with its processors, maybe someone out there with more knowledge that I have can answer the question "Can two-factor encryption be undermined by the computing power Google used today to generate a Pi Day (March 14th) news release?"

The commentator above is correct; scientists define a group as a separate species only if it can't interbreed with other closely related groups.

Leave it to the lawyers to muddy the waters. The misnamed Endangered Species Act apparently defined a species as any separate breeding population (the Florida panthers, for example) in order to "extend the reach" of the law well beyond merely protecting endangered species. This is the usual example of lawyers and legislators using the law to try to redefine words for public relations purposes. The result is that the public- and the lawyers- now don't know what a species is. This is the left wing version of the unborn child gambit on the right.

Personally, I think Neanderthal girls are hot. I keep hoping to meet one at the beach. They're really good at beach volleyball. Do Neanderthals girls qualify for NCAA athletic scholarships?

This is nonsense and Slashdot should get its act together.

Why are they publishing a public relations piece? I believe in global warming. It has affected glaciers and will continue to do so, with consequences that are both good and bad. But this supposed scientific report... let's start with "Who are they and where is this published?"

Who are they? We don't know. All we have is the following: "the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment was put together over five years by 210 authors. The report includes input from more than 350 researchers and policymakers from 22 countries. " This appears to be the usual self-appointed group of experts. Again, they may be right or wrong- or more likely giving us the "This is horrible" bad news without the offsetting good news (more arable land, etc). Further tracking reveals all the four named authors are all from something called the "International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) Kathmandu Nepal" And who funds this? Good luck...

Where was it published? You follow the links in the article and they all lead to springer.com which says they are "Providing researchers with access to millions of scientific documents from journals, books, series, protocols, reference works and proceedings."

NO! I WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT WAS PUBLISHED. IS THIS A PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLE OR NOT? The answer appears to be "not" . At https://link.springer.com/book... we finally get the following: "This open access volume is the first comprehensive assessment of the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region...". This is the usual non-profit funded PR piece trying to affect public opinion and through it public policy. I may agree with the conclusions or I may not but don't kid yourself, this is propaganda by one side of a policy debate and nothing more.

So thirty minutes of digging on my part yields "This is not science it is partisan BS"

Now back to the original question; Why is Slashdot publishing this? Are the Slashdot moderators and editors who select what appears here incompetent or are they so wound up in the left/liberal, phony moral outrage worldview that all an article has to do is agree with their moral posture to get into Slashdot?

Want to stop global warming? Well first stop flying around the world in jet planes, the biggest per-mile contributor to upper atmosphere pollution. Come on outraged snowflakes, forget the snowboarding trip to Colorado and do your part to save the planet. You are, after all, among the world's biggest polluters of the upper atmosphere. As for me, even knowing, I'll still head for Europe this summer. Dear snowflakes let me make it clear; I'm not claiming to be more moral, more pure than you, just less twitishly pompous.

And dear Slashdot moderators and editors; now could we get back to real news about technology for a change?

What does that mean for me and my college roommate? He has a crush on the only cute girl in my econ class. I told him she leaves the Econ Building M-W-F at exactly 11:50, tweets about the class (leaking her position data) while walking across the quad one of two ways to the Student Union and orders a burrito for lunch. So the best way to "accidentally" meet her is to track which path she's using by the tweet location, walk out of the Electrical Engineering building at exactly 11:51 and head either northwest or southwest (depending on the tweet info) then let nature take it's course.

Now I discover I'm probably going to be violating a Facebook patent by telling him the algorithm via a text. It could be worse I guess; I could owe a Chinese company a royalty or get sued by a Boston patent troll.

As an act of civic courage I'd like to say the following

1) I look at Tumblr porn regularly. Actually it is in bursts; sometimes an hour at a time for days on end, other times weeks will go by with no porn. My internal state is reflected in my internet usage. I'm fascinated by the categories and what they mean. There should be more academic research but the academics I know say any publication on the subject is a death sentence professionally. And there is clearly a lot of Russian/foreign influence pedaling and hidden ideology on Tumblr. The new owners want clean hands and they are willing to pay the financial price. I both applaud them and regret what we are loosing.

2) Google searches for porn are revealing. Hit "Safe search off" and check it out. But no Tumblr material shows up unless you specifically ask with a search like "Tumblr, bukakke (sic), interracial (or just IR), and trannie" The results are amazing but largely hidden from the average viewer. This is how censorship now works. And maybe it isn't a bad idea for the corporation and the viewers who don't want to see the stuff.

3) I want to watch it but am deeply troubled by the idea that 11 year-olds are being mentally and emotionally formed by this stuff.; Ask the kids. It is always "Well, some of my friends..."; ask "Do your parents know?" and they give you the "Are you kidding" look. So if you are an adult with kids, ask- privately. Especially the kids of your own gender. The results are everywhere and totally invisible to most adults. Tumblr Ana sites are hugely informative- and dangerous; troubled 18 year-olds with daddy issues know how to suck dick like a pro (and they are smart, thoughtful half-formed little humans). Tumblr legitimizes everything.

4) Congresspeople in both parties are as troubled as I am. I have no idea if this is good legislation or not, but something needs to be done here. How do we balance the need to protect kids, my right to watch all the porn I want and the privacy of people like me? I'm not sure but age has made me a lot more humble about the problems of honorable people grappling with issues like this.

I believe in climate change and most of the report BIG problems with this posting here

1) The person identified as the poster "msmash" is a first timer with no previous Slashdot record (read the heading with her name versus the typical heading) and no profile.

2) Hate Trump as much as you want, but the Slashdot/AP a headline misrepresents what Trump. said. The Slashdot headline: "Trump Says He Doesn't Believe Government Climate Report Finding in a New Low". AP headline: "Trump: ‘I don’t believe’ government climate report finding. Notice where the quotation marks are. "I don't believe" are in quotes but the rest of the headline isn't. I doubt this bit of misleading headline was an accident by the very smart, competent AP editors. And according to the AP article what did Trump actually say? At https://apnews.com/c1dfca3088b... after SIX paragraphs of editorializing we find what he actually said: "The president said he read some of the report “and it’s fine” but not the part about the devastating economic impact. “I don’t believe it,” Trump said, adding that if “every other place on Earth is dirty, that’s not so good.” So Trump AGREES WITH THE REPORT but questions the conclusion about the impact.

And he has good reason to- the report speculates a "worse case" sometime in the future (no date provided) of a an 8.5 degree temperature rise and further speculates on "outdoor labor unable to work because of climate change" to come up with the 10% loss figure. Even the AP article reviewers have a problem with this approach: "Yohe said it was unfortunate that some media jumped on that 10 percent number because that was a rare case of hyperbole in the report. “The 10 percent is not implausible as a possible future for 2100,” Yohe said. “It’s just not terribly likely.” Kopp, on the other hand, said the 10 percent figure seems believable. “This is probably a best estimate,” Kopp said. “It could be larger. It could be smaller.”. This is an example of the permanent government of DC civil servants (who are sometimes right, sometimes not) piling up a rickety pyramid of assumptions-based-on-assuptions, to come up with a scary hypothesis for 80+ years in the future and and then slapping an imagined, highly speculative "cost" on it This sort of nonsense/propaganda is what leads many reasonable people to think the whole Climate Change" thing is a hoax, which it is not.

3) About the comments. At 7:00 am CST we had five up for a postings on slavery and other off-topic comments. This to me suggests that some bots have crept into the "like" system and maybe the original poster may not be real at all. Not an accusation exactly but no profile and no previous Slashdot comments or posting... a bit suspicious.

Readers, just be aware that all sides are now acting like the Russians and you as a reader have to be apply a very critical eye to the stuff you are being fed.
   

I've had a number of small cameras with 30x lenses. Much better than a cell phone. Both Sony and Canon cameras used to come with a manual the size of the camera and thin. It fit in the camera casse. First, there was no 10 pages of "Do not drop the camera in toilet" junk. Second, they just showed a pic of the camera and then gave you the tree of features for each setting. Short and sweet. Usually about 40 pages. If ANY manufacturer had a small camera with a manual like that it would be my next buy. They don't exist (and I've really looked).

Why the manual and not the internet? I can circle things in the index. I can underline and mark the features I keep forgetting. I don't have to stand in a square in Montenegro, turn on my cell phone and search the internet to find the so-called manual (meaning a brochure of all the add-ons they are trying to sell you plus a long list of half-blank pages with WARNING! in size 4 type inserted by the legal team). I need the equivalent of a Linux cheat sheet.

A note for the Japanese companies making these wonderful but barely usable $300 cameras. There is a real business opportunity here....

I spent 50 years driving DC to Rhode Island.

About this interchange: The Penn Turnpike was built before the interstates and was a toll road. So the 1950s connector between the new NJ section of I-95 (at exit 7A I think) and the Penn Turnpike was a "turnpike only" connection. Pennsylvania refused to allow it to connect to free roads so when a free interstate was run through Philadelphia there was no connection . The same thing happened in western MD where I-70 came near the Turnpike. PA refused to connect them so all travelers were shuttled through two miles of Pennsylvania Burger Chefs and gas stations in order extract some money before the traveler could get to the Penn Turnpike. It was the county's biggest business.

Two miles west of the NJ Turnpike at exit 7 is the golden north-south road; I-295, which goes through the NJ suburbs of Philadelphia all the way to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and is free. All the trucks going south get off the Jersey Pike at exit 7, gas up, take a snooze and head south on the free road, now- finally- well marked. Until about 2000 the road was never mentioned when you were going south in New Jersey and coming north into NJ across the Delaware Memorial Bridge (which incidentally has a phenomenal view- get in the right-hand lane, go slow and take in the view) there was simply an exit called "route 130". If there is heavy traffic going south on the Jersey Pike (every Sunday in the summer) get off on 295 and get straight to the bridge- no five mile backup to pay the tolls. The whole goal of NJ was to keep you off the free road and keep you paying the NJ highway toll- it was just like the Penn Turnpike.

If it is late fall and your are driving NYC to DC go down the main eastern shore roads and look at the flocks of geese wheeling and landing in the freshly harvested corn fields. They are huge, dignified birds and loud. Stop for 20 minutes and really look. This is the real thing- a National Geographic show in front of your eyes. Children are amazed. Then head to DC via the Bay Bridge at Annapolis- free heading south.

In my early youth dodging tolls was an art form. There were seven 25 cent tolls on the Connecticut Turnpike between RI and NYC; just flip the coin and drive on. Late at night the rich people would often miss, grumble and throw a second coin. So we poverty-stricken college students at 2 am would pretend to miss, get out of the car and usually harvest half-a-dozen quarters before the toll collecters could stop us (they had a nice side job keeping the coins for themselves). By the time we hit NYC we were usually $ 10 richer, enough to pay for the gas (30-50 cents/ gallon and in a price war as low as 19 cents). At the time the federal minimum wage was 85 cents/hour.

I still know the back roads through the Bronx to avoid the horrible NYC jams on the GW Bridge and at least once in your life heading north at 2 am (the best time to go through NYC) you should go through town via the 1920s, two lane Holland Tunnel turn left and surf north on 7th/8th Avenue with the cabs, an endless stream of red lights timed at 25-30 mph going almost 10 miles north to the GW bridge and back onto 95 north. Today heading north I usually go DC to Baltimore, north to Harrisburg and across the mountains with the trucks to the new Tappen Zee and I 84. A bit longer but much nicer.

The driving into New England is so bad that most truckers refuse to do it and if they do drive it must charge very high rates, which is why New England has such lousy fruits and vegetables and at such high prices. If this were Europe they would widen I-81, cross the Hudson north of the Tappen Zee and get straight to the Mass Pike. I've just spent the summer in the Balkans, often traveling by bus. Bosnia and Macedonia now have better interstates that the U.S. and far more interesting truck stops. And you should see how they build the new divided roads- much higher quality than in the U.S.- they are built to last. But then the locals compare the new EU roads to the Roman roads- they expect the bridges to last for 1,000 years.

The folks pushing the message want to call it "an alert", which makes it sound important (sometimes it is), official and mandatory.

A more neutral term is "message", as in "The Feds want to send you a message". We have a long history of people with power trying to force users to listen to or view a message. Corporations embed spam messages in devices ("Your operating system is out of date" and "You haven't backed up your IPhone in four weeks"),. Governments... remember when Amber Alerts were sold as a way to stop child kidnappers? Now the messages on the Amber Alert signs on the highway are about "Granddad didn't come home last night", the 15 year-old girl who ran off with her 18 year-old boyfriend and about divorced spouses who didn't get the kids back home in time after a mandatory visit.

And now we have the end of the line of absurdities; when there is absolutely nothing to report the signs tell us to "Buckle your seat belt", which is pure "public service" advertising. If reading a text while driving is slightly dangerous what about a ticker-tape Amber sign?

Somewhere on those signs may be a real kidnapper or murderer on the loose. But crying wolf too often with vague messages has conditioned us to ignore the message stream, which is too bad for the occasional real Ambers we once claimed to protect.

The federal alert messages may be true or false, important or not important; the issue is "Should you be forced to receive them on your phone?".

Note I said "messages", not "Alerts". There are arguments on both sides. I'm only dealing with the slanted ad-lingo which the word "Alert" represents.

Budget season. Public presentation by a four star screaming "Crisis! Give me more money!"

A few years ago somebody got the list of porn tapes a supreme court justice had rented. Suddenly we had a privacy crisis. Soon a law was passed "protecting" these records from public disclosure. The lesson is simple; if we want to have our privacy protected we must invade the privacy of our rulers- the President, the legislators, the judges and all the public figures including the network anchors and the late night TV hosts. They hate being exposed but more than that they hate being laughed at for enjoying an occasional sperm facial tape.

So the hunt is on. Want to know who Bill Clinton's daddy really is? Why just grab an "Abandoned DNA sample" (meaning a water glass he has sipped from) and get a street person to submit it for $79 to 23AndMe or one of the other sites as "My DNA". Then follow the GEDMatch instructions and upload the results. Voila! Party Time. Map Bill's real family

Is Alen Dershowitz 100% Jewish? Is Bill Clinton's real father the lawyer all the locals in Hope, AK think he is? How many Congressmen knocked up a girl in high school ? MLK? Are you a Kennedy? Who in media is part black or part Neanderthal? How many half-sisters and brothers does Sigourny Weaver have lurking in the bushes out in Scarsdale (her daddy Pat was a handsome devil)? You too might be an heir to the Bronfman fortune, one of Charles Manson's kids or General George Patton's grandson..... Family reunions will be a lot more interesting.

Of course our rulers will be shocked, truly shocked, and quickly pass laws to shut down the party but the genetic cat will be out of the bag and some 18 year-old will found D-NApster and host the Obama DNA in Iceland or Tuvalu. Imagine the new forms of blackmail and international terrorism... A bit of Bill Cosby's medicine cabinet to put you to sleep and you wake up and find some Rumanian kid is selling your eggs or sperm on Alibaba...